The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan

Author:Donal Ryan [Ryan, Donal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2022-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Drama

Pearl was starting now to try to walk.

She pulled herself upwards and roared her delight at this thrilling new aspect, her new view of the world, her new power over gravity, before whumping back onto her bottom with a sweet oof. She pointed from the buggy and screeched at birds and dogs and passers-by, at clouds and trees and the small waves that lapped the foreshore where they sat, Saoirse and Honey and sometimes Josh, and Pearl rolling and crawling and trying to make herself mobile enough to get to the sparkling water, to rebaptize herself in its silty shallows.

Saoirse wondered how Honey could bear these expanses of space and time, having lived her life in a city, where millions of people moved around each other, colliding and living and dying in the same small spaces. There was a market outside her window where traders hollered from the early morning and you could buy anything that you wanted. You could buy a human there, if you had the money, Honey said. Saoirse felt a thrill at the thought of this, and a fear: she imagined Pearl in such a place, where all sorts of terrors and excitements waited outside her door, love and sex and heartbreak and joy, all the dramas of the world.

Honey said she’d had a life of drama. She never wanted to be involved in drama again as long as she lived, she said. And she told Saoirse about her parents and their terrible love, how they couldn’t survive together or apart, how they were like fuel and flame together. Her life had been full of fear, she said, for a long time. Fragmented and chaotic and ever-changing. Her mother had left her and her father and had never really come back to her. She had more children with another man, whom Honey barely knew. She told Saoirse about her father’s pure heart and wounded mind, what had happened to him at a place called Goose Green, down at the bottom of the far side of the world. What the hell were they doing sending my dad there?

Saoirse wished she could be the one to have that line to say. Just as Honey had said it. In rage and sadness, in a soft, sweet voice. She wished she could have Honey’s height and slender hands, her long legs and heavy braided hair. She wished the cars that slowed to a near stop as they walked the lake road were doing so for her, at the sight of her, at the shock of her unexpected beauty. She felt a strange pride and a washing tide of happiness at the sight of Honey, swinging Pearl upwards from her buggy seat into her arms, and Pearl placing a chubby hand on each of Honey’s cheeks, their eyes meeting, and their lips. She understood why Honey said she wanted to make films, slow and quiet, with no drama in them, or tension, or violence, just love.

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